#beseiged

This was a very short podcast episode, which I wasn't surprised by, because this is a very straight-forward episode.

Not mentioned by the podcasters, but an observation of mine - Fi and Sam have spent two days in a car surveilling Michael’s impostor and they’re still on good terms. Fi bitches about how awful surveillance is even when she’s sitting in a car with Michael. Their relationship really has come a million miles ❤️

Chris: They’re debating about whether he’s a smart guy, like some kind of mastermind, and the reason that Sam thinks he’s not is because he has all these pamphlets that he’s reading about raising alpacas for profit. (Alpacas in the Miami climate🤣🤣🤣)

Bri: Mr Pickles is a very fun bit that I wish they’d gone into more.  (They could have! There’s that line from Fi about ‘He brought his doggie?’ which is delivered absolutely perfectly by Gabrielle, but that’s all we got out of Mr Pickles.)

Sam’s client is a friend of Elsa’s, and she will do ‘anything’ if Sam helps her out.

Bri: Once again, Michael doesn’t want to hear about Sam’s escapades.

Chris: I think it’s pegging.

Bri: It’s absolutely pegging, but it has to be, like, pegging plus, because Sam’s all excited. They’re going further than ever before.

Chris: Sam’s getting a ball gag 🤣🤣🤣

Sam says this job should be an easy talk.

Chris: Michael is rightly skeptical. Michael has seen Burn Notice 😁

The podcasters are disagreeing somewhat on the plot of the week. Bri is taking the piss out of it, but Chris is on board.

Chris: I love this premise. It’s one of those things that feels weirdly more relevant after Trump than it did then. I knew there were people like this out there in 2011, but it feels like a warning shot for the things that were going to happen later. It’s nice to explore that and explore the fundamental patheticness of it while also exploring the dangerousness of it.

Bri: I do think it’s an interesting premise. I don’t care for the episode as a whole – I would have loved to see Michael Horowitz’s take on it.

Bri: While there was a lot to explore in this episode, there wasn’t a lot that happened. It was a fairly short recap that I wrote because it felt very paint by numbers. If somebody had turned in this script to me in one of my classes, I would have been ‘Rewrite this into a more interesting scene.’

(I’m with Bri here. I think the episode would have been better if the militia and its leader had been handled in a more clever, subtle way. This plot-of-the-week very quickly gets boring on re-watch.)

Fi leaves Jacob alone in Michael’s loft when she goes off to help the rest of the gang with the militia.

Bri: I assumed this was going to lead to some kind of big mistake and Jacob’s going to do something dumb, or at least leading us to a scene where the dog has destroyed their house and some of Fi’s apartment fixings, but no, Jacob just hangs out. I’m telling you, nothing happens in this episode. There’s nothing interesting happening in any scene, it’s just like, ‘Yeah, that will get us to the next scene.’

Chris: I kind of like the way that this episode is about masculinity, where it’s more it shows you a bunch of versions of masculinity that are varying degrees of safe and healthy without a super amount of judgement of them, other then showing you the results of them.  I think if this is going to be a show about masculinity, and it is, it was doing a better job of it than some other episodes. I agree with you there’s not a lot here, but I like the things that are here.

Bri: I agree with you, but my frustration with this episode is that every scene has potential to be slightly more interesting than it is. You could do the exact plot of this episode with many of the same scenes, but far more interesting interpretations of it.

Chris: It does feel like there’s a scaffolding here, but there’s not a lot of meat on it.

(100% agree. There’s nothing wrong with the plot – it’s just not written that well, and given how good many of the episodes are by season five, the drop in quality really stands out.)

It doesn’t get to be a great episode of Burn Notice on the podcast criteria (not many good spy tips, nobody has an alias, no good role for Jesse or Madeline etc) and that’s fair. Also definitely not a great episode of TV! It’s the first episode of season five to not be great at anything.

Bri: This was a competent but ultimately soulless episode.

Chris: It just existed.

Thunderscape Vistas: Beseiged Village

Thunderscape Vistas: Beseiged Village

The second Thunderscape Vista clocks in at 13 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page back cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page ToC, 1 page SRD, leaving us with 8 pages of content, so let’s take a look!

  All righty, we once more begin this supplement with a brief in-character flavor-text before diving into the background, which is a bit simpler this time around: The…